Compare 25+ LLM API providers and their free tiers — Groq, OpenRouter, Gemini, NVIDIA NIM, and more, beside paid APIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and Cerebras. Exact rate limits and token quotas. Catalogue dates August to November 2026.
Free LLM API access has never been better. Groq delivers gpt-oss-120b at 30 RPM on custom LPU hardware — the fastest free inference available. Mistral: The Free plan has included no API access since about 2026-11-05. API keys and API calls require billing activation and pay-as-you-go with prepaid credits. OpenRouter aggregates 25+ free models through one OpenAI-compatible API. GitHub Models is recorded as Retired — GitHub ended it, so it is no longer a way to reach 100+ models for free.
This page compares 21 LLM API providers — from proprietary model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) to open-model inference platforms (Groq, Cerebras, NVIDIA NIM) and AI gateways (OpenRouter, Portkey). The rate limit comparison table below has the data developers actually need when choosing a provider.
First-party APIs from the companies that train frontier models. Higher quality ceilings but typically lower free tier limits — these are the APIs behind GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Grok.
Free tier: Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Gemini 3.8 Flash, 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemini 3 Flash Preview, Gemini Embedding 2 and Gemma 4 are free of charge. Also free of charge are Gemini 3.8 Live (real-time voice), Gemini 3.5 Live Translate (translation), Gemini 3.5 Transcribe (speech-to-text), Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS (text-to-speech). Gemini Decision (gemini-decision-1), released 2026-11-11, is a multimodal decision model available through the Decisions API. It answers yes/no, choice and rubric questions with probabilities and generates zero output tokens, so it has no output price; input is free of charge on the free tier with 10,000 requests per day, and $0.10 per million input tokens on the paid tier. Gemini 4 Hydrogen (gemini-4-hydrogen), released 2026-11-12, is free of charge on the Gemini API free tier for input, output and context caching. On the paid tier, Gemini 4 Hydrogen costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens (output includes thinking tokens), with context caching at $0.075 (implicit caching only); on the Batch API, Gemini 4 Hydrogen is $0.75 input and $3.75 output. The other Gemini 4 models, Gemini 4 Carbon (gemini-4-carbon) and Gemini 4 Argon (gemini-4-argon), are paid only, as are Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash (gemini-omni-1.2-flash). Gemini 4 Carbon, which Google calls its most capable reasoning model, has been generally available since 2026-11-10 and is not available on the Gemini API free tier. Gemini 4 Argon, generally available since 2026-10-13, is not available on the Gemini API free tier. According to ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/google-ai-plans, "Gemini 4 Argon is not available on the Free plan." Gemini 4 Argon is available through the Gemini API on the paid tier. "Direct use of the Gemini API (such as using API keys or external applications) is billed and managed separately," per ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/google-ai-plans. Google AI Pro and Ultra provide access to Gemini 4 Argon in Google AI Studio, per ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/google-ai-plans. Gemini 4 Argon is in Antigravity on Google AI Ultra and paid Google AI Pro. In Google AI Studio, Gemini 4 Carbon requires a Google AI Ultra plan and is not available on the Free or Google AI Pro plans (aistudio.google.com/docs/google-ai-plans). In Antigravity, Gemini 4 Carbon is available on Google AI Ultra and Enterprise only (antigravity.google/docs/models). On a Google AI Pro trial, Argon is only available "on trial with eligible premium devices" (antigravity.google/docs/models). Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 are not included on Google AI Pro trials; trial users and those with memberships through third-party partners, Pixel Pass or Google Fi manage subscriptions through Google One. Google AI Pro via partner offers like Jio's does not include Gemini 4 Argon, Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Claude Opus 5.5 in Antigravity. Per a Google staff member on discuss.ai.google.dev (2026-10-21), "Those frontier models are restricted to directly billed (non-trial/non-promotional) Google AI Pro, Google AI Ultra and Enterprise plans." No Gemini image model has a free tier in the API. Nano Banana 2.1 (gemini-nano-banana-2.1) became generally available on 2026-10-06. It costs $0.0336 per 1K image, $0.0504 per 2K image and $0.113 per 4K image. The Batch API halves those prices. Nano Banana Pro costs $0.134 per 1K or 2K image and $0.24 per 4K image. Except for Gemini Decision, Google publishes no free-tier rate limits; each project's limits are shown in Google AI Studio. Developers report 429 errors showing 20 requests per day for Gemini 3.x Flash models and 500 requests per day for 3.x Flash-Lite models as of September 2026. Rate limits apply per project, not per API key. Daily request quotas reset at midnight Pacific time, per Google's rate-limits page. Since 2026-09-18 Google serves the Gemini 2.5 models only to users who have used them before, and points new projects to 3.5 Flash-Lite or 3.8 Flash. If your app calls gemini-3.7-flash, Google deprecated it on 2026-10-08. Requests to gemini-3.7-flash are routed automatically to gemini-3.8-flash. Google says to update the model string to gemini-3.8-flash. Google deprecated gemini-2.5-pro and gemini-2.5-flash on 2026-11-02. Both models shut down on 2026-12-01. Use them until that date. From that date, requests to gemini-2.5-pro route to gemini-3.8-flash and are billed at its rates. Requests to gemini-2.5-flash route to gemini-3.5-flash-lite and are billed at its rates. Update your model string before 2026-12-01 and review Google’s migration guides for breaking API changes. gemini-2.5-flash-lite is not deprecated. If your app calls Gemini 3.5 Flash (gemini-3.5-flash), Google deprecated it on 2026-10-08. Requests to gemini-3.5-flash are routed automatically to gemini-3.6-flash. Google says to update the model string to gemini-3.6-flash or gemini-3.8-flash. Google shut down Gemini Omni Flash Preview (gemini-omni-flash-preview) on 2026-10-22. Google's replacement is gemini-omni-1.2-flash. Google shuts down Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash (gemini-omni-1.1-flash) on December 3, 2026; after that, requests that name gemini-omni-1.1-flash are answered by gemini-omni-1.2-flash at Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash rates. Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite (gemini-3.1-flash-lite) can be called until 2027-05-07, when Google shuts it down. Google's replacement is gemini-3.5-flash-lite. Paid, per million tokens (input/output; output prices include thinking tokens): Gemini 4 Carbon $2/$10 through 2026-11-30 (context caching $0.10, then $0.20, implicit caching only); Gemini 4 Argon $2/$10 through 2026-11-30 (context caching $0.10, then $0.20, implicit caching only); Gemini 3.8 Flash $0.75/$3.75 until 2026-12-31, then $1.50 input and $7.50 output from 2027-01-01 (3.6 Flash: the same prices and dates); Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite $0.30/$2.50; Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite $0.25/$1.50; Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview $2/$12 (prompts up to 200K tokens; prompts over 200K tokens cost $4 input and $18 output). Through 2026-11-30, Gemini 4 Argon's Standard output price is below Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview's for prompts up to 200K tokens, with the same input price; from 2026-12-01 Argon's is higher. From December 1, 2026, Gemini 4 Argon will cost $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens for Standard, $2 input and $10 output for Batch API, $2 input and $10 output for Flex, and $7.20 input and $36 output for Priority. From December 1, 2026, Gemini 4 Carbon will also cost $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens for Standard, $2 input and $10 output for Batch API and Flex, and $7.20 input and $36 output for Priority. The Batch API costs half the standard price; Gemini 3.8 Flash is $0.375 input and $1.875 output per million tokens through 2026-12-31. Gemini 4 Carbon and Gemini 4 Argon on the Batch API are $1 input and $5 output through 2026-11-30. Google also sells two tiers, Flex and Priority, both in Preview. A request picks one with the service_tier field ("flex" or "priority"); without it the request is Standard. Gemini 4 Carbon and Gemini 4 Argon on Flex are $1 input and $5 output through 2026-11-30; on Priority they are $3.60 input and $18 output through 2026-11-30. "The Gemini Flex API is an inference tier that offers a 50% cost reduction compared to standard rates, in exchange for variable latency and best-effort availability" (ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/flex-inference). "Priority inference is priced at 75-100% more than the standard API and billed per token" (ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/priority-inference). The Gemini API Contributor Tier is an invite-only private preview. Eligible users will be invited by email. It offers half the Standard price for Gemini 4 Carbon, Gemini 4 Argon, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, Gemini 3.8 Flash, and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite. Google uses the data from those models to improve its products. "Please don't submit sensitive or personal information" (ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/logs-policy). Grounding with Google Search is supported on the free tier for Gemini 3.8 Live, Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking and Gemini 3.1 Flash Live Preview. It is not available on the free tier for Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Gemini 4 Argon or the Gemini 3.x Flash, Flash-Lite and Pro models. On the paid tier, 5,000 search requests a month are free, shared across Gemini 3 and newer models, then $14 per 1,000. Accounts opened after 2026-03-02 cannot spend the $300 Google Cloud welcome credit on the Gemini API.
Since about 2026-11-05, Mistral's Free plan covers Vibe and Studio and does not include API access. Creating API keys and calling the API require billing activation and pay-as-you-go with prepaid credits. Before then, Free mode let anyone create API keys with no credit card. The pricing page listed $10 a month of API credits on the Free plan until 2026-10-07. Mistral Pro costs $14.99 a month and includes $25.50 a month in API credits, shared across the API, Studio and Vibe Code. It included $30 a month until 2026-10-07. Verified students who have not used Vibe or Le Chat before can take the Education plan for $5.99 a month, for up to 12 months, with $15 a month in API credits. The Free plan has limited messages, web searches and coding sessions in Vibe. API prices: Ministral 3 (3B) $0.1/$0.1 (per 1M tokens); Mistral Small 4 $0.15/$0.6 (per 1M tokens); Mistral Large 3 $0.5/$1.5 (per 1M tokens); Mistral Large 4 (mistral-large-4; public preview since 2026-10-06, 1M-token context) $0.7/$2.1 (per 1M tokens); this price started on 2026-10-29; from 2026-10-20 until then, it was $1.36/$4.18; Mistral Medium 3.5 $1.5/$7.5 (per 1M tokens); Codestral $0.3/$0.9 (per 1M tokens). To call Mistral Large 4, use the model name mistral-large-4; mistral-large-latest still points to Mistral Large 3 (mistral-large-2512). Mistral Embed is $0.1 per 1M input tokens, and Codestral Embed is $0.15 per 1M input tokens. OCR 3 (mistral-ocr-2512) costs $2 per 1,000 pages and $3 per 1,000 annotated pages. OCR 4.1 (mistral-ocr-4-1) costs $4 per 1,000 pages and $5 per 1,000 annotated pages. OCR 3 remains available. Mistral Moderation 2 is free. Speech: Voxtral 3 models, released 2026-10-20: Voxtral Mini Transcribe 3 (batch) costs $0.0035 per minute of audio, Voxtral Small Transcribe 3 $0.004 per minute, Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime 3 $0.008 per minute, and Voxtral Speech 3 (text-to-speech) $13 per 1M characters. The earlier models are still offered: Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 $0.003 per minute, Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime $0.006 per minute, and Voxtral TTS (text-to-speech) $16 per 1M characters. Mistral's voice agent API costs $0.04 per minute with Mistral Small 4 for reasoning, and $0.08 per minute with any other reasoning model. Mistral retired these models in 2026, and a request to a retired model fails with a 404 error: Mistral Large 2.1 (mistral-large-2411), Pixtral Large (pixtral-large-2411) and Devstral Medium 1.0 (devstral-medium-2507) on 2026-05-31, replaced by Mistral Medium 3.5; Devstral Small 1.1 (devstral-small-2507) on 2026-05-31, replaced by Mistral Small 4; Voxtral Mini and Voxtral Mini Transcribe (voxtral-mini-2507) on 2026-05-31, replaced by Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2; OCR 2 (mistral-ocr-2505) on 2026-05-31 and OCR 4.0 (mistral-ocr-4-0) on 2026-09-30, replaced by OCR 4.1; Mistral Moderation (mistral-moderation-2411) on 2026-06-30, replaced by Mistral Moderation 2; Mistral Small 3.2 (mistral-small-2506) and Magistral Small 1.2 (magistral-small-2509) on 2026-07-31, replaced by Mistral Small 4; Mistral Nemo 12B (open-mistral-nemo-2407) on 2026-07-31, replaced by Ministral 3 8B; Devstral 2 (devstral-2512) and Magistral Medium 1.2 (magistral-medium-2509) on 2026-07-31, and Mistral Medium 3 and 3.1 (mistral-medium-2505, mistral-medium-2508) on 2026-08-31, replaced by Mistral Medium 3.5. Mistral's table at docs.mistral.ai/models also lists the Labs models it retired. Z.ai GLM 5.2 (zai-glm-5-2) retired on 2026-10-31, replaced by GLM 5.3. Mistral deprecated Mistral Large 3 (mistral-large-2512), Mistral Medium 3.5 (mistral-medium-3-5), Voxtral TTS (voxtral-mini-tts-2603), Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 (voxtral-mini-2602) and Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime (voxtral-mini-transcribe-realtime-2602) on 2026-10-31; all five retire on 2027-04-30, replaced by Mistral Large 4 for the two text models, Voxtral TTS 3 for Voxtral TTS, Voxtral Mini Transcribe 3 for Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 and Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime 3 for Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime. Batch processing is half price, and cached input tokens cost up to 90% less. Mistral publishes no rate-limit figures. Each organization's per-model limits (tokens per minute, requests per second) appear in Admin Panel > API > Limits. The tools of Mistral's MCP server are grouped by Studio capability: Skills, Workflows, Connectors, Observability, Evaluations, Organization and Apps.
AI model API for Command chat models, Embed, Rerank, Transcribe and Parse. Every account starts with a Trial API key: calls made with it are free and limited to 1,000 API calls a month. Trial rate limits: 20 requests a minute per Chat model, 2,000 Embed inputs a minute and 10 Rerank requests a minute. Trial keys can use all of Cohere's models and APIs. Production keys are pay-as-you-go. Prices per 1M tokens: Command R7B $0.0375/$0.15; Command R $0.15/$0.60. The pricing page lists Command A+ (Apache 2.0) at $0 through an API key and as a model download.
AI API platform. One model is priced Free in OpenAI's own table: the moderation model omni-moderation-latest. No GPT model is priced free. GPT prices per 1M tokens (Standard, short context): gpt-6-astra $10.00/$50.00; gpt-6.1-sol $2.00/$10.00; gpt-6.1-terra $1.00/$5.00; gpt-6-sol $2.00/$10.00; gpt-6-luna $0.10/$0.50; gpt-5.6-sol $4.00/$20.00; gpt-5.6-terra $2.00/$12.00; gpt-5.6-luna $0.20/$1.20. OpenAI's promotional pricing for gpt-5.6-sol is available until November 30, 2026. Batch and Flex processing halve these prices. gpt-6-astra cached input $1.00 per 1M tokens, against $10.00 uncached. gpt-6.1-sol cached input $0.10 per 1M tokens, against $2.00 uncached. gpt-6.1-terra cached input $0.05 per 1M tokens, against $1.00 uncached. gpt-6-luna cached input $0.01 per 1M tokens, against $0.10 uncached. Prompt caching is on by default. Cache writes cost 1.25× the input price for 30 minutes or 2.5× for 12 hours. Embeddings from $0.02 per 1M tokens. Three further free amounts are sub-quotas inside paid tools: 1 GB of File search storage (then $0.10/GB per day), 1 GB per account per month of ChatKit upload storage, and search content tokens from the web search preview tool on non-reasoning models. Since 2026-10-28, OpenAI's API docs say: "Eligible ChatGPT Pro and Business subscriptions can claim free API credits as part of their subscription benefits." Pro's $100, $200 and $500 tiers get $100, $200 and $500 in API credits a month. Business gets $20 per paid Standard seat and $100 per paid Premium seat, pooled and capped at $500 per workspace a month.
Grok API, pay as you go: sign up at console.x.ai, then load it with credits. grok-4.7 $2.00/$6.00 (per 1M tokens, under 200k prompt tokens). grok-4.3 $1.25/$2.50 (under 200k prompt tokens). grok-build-0.1 $1.00/$2.00 (under 200k prompt tokens). grok-4.6 and grok-4.5 cost the same as grok-4.7 ($2.00 input and $6.00 output per 1M tokens under 200k prompt tokens), and grok-4.20 (0309 reasoning, non-reasoning and multi-agent) the same as grok-4.3 ($1.25 input and $2.50 output). A request whose prompt reaches 200k tokens is billed at the long-context rate for all its tokens, twice the standard rate: grok-4.7 and grok-4.6 go from $2.00 input and $6.00 output per 1M tokens to $4.00 and $12.00; grok-4.3 and grok-4.20 from $1.25 and $2.50 to $2.50 and $5.00; grok-build-0.1 from $1.00 and $2.00 to $2.00 and $4.00. Cached input costs $0.50 on grok-4.7 and grok-4.6, $0.30 on grok-4.5, and $0.20 on grok-4.3, grok-4.20 and grok-build-0.1. These cached rates also double from 200k prompt tokens. Context windows: 500k tokens for grok-4.7, grok-4.6 and grok-4.5; 1M for grok-4.3 and grok-4.20; 256k for grok-build-0.1. The US endpoint costs 10% more than the global endpoint. Priority Processing (service_tier "priority" on Chat Completions and the Responses API) bills text requests at 2x standard rates. A request xAI's system finds in violation of its usage guidelines is still charged for its generation; one caught before generation in the Responses API costs a $0.05 violation fee. On 2026-05-15 xAI retired eight model names, which still resolve, so code that calls them keeps working: requests to Grok 4.1 Fast (grok-4-1-fast-reasoning, grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning), Grok 4 Fast (grok-4-fast-reasoning, grok-4-fast-non-reasoning), grok-4-0709 and grok-3 are served by grok-4.3 (low reasoning effort for the reasoning names and grok-4-0709, none for the non-reasoning names and grok-3) and billed at grok-4.3 rates; grok-code-fast-1 is served by grok-build-0.1; grok-imagine-image-pro is served by grok-imagine-image-2.0 at low quality. grok-voice-transcribe-1.0 reached end of life on 2026-10-02; its requests are served by grok-voice-transcribe-2.0 at the same price. Image generation: grok-imagine-image $0.02 per image; grok-imagine-image-2.0 $0.04 per image at 1K resolution and low quality, up to $0.08 per image at 2K resolution and medium quality; $0.01 per input image when editing. grok-imagine-image-quality was retired on 2026-11-02, and its requests are served by grok-imagine-image-2.0 at low quality. Voice API: speech-to-text costs $0.10 per hour of audio (REST) or $0.20 per hour (streaming), text-to-speech $15.00 per 1M characters, and speech-to-speech with grok-voice-3.0 $0.08 a minute ($4.80 an hour). grok-voice-3.0 replaced grok-voice-2.0 on 2026-10-14 at the same price; grok-voice-2.0 is deprecated, and the grok-voice-latest alias now points to grok-voice-3.0. Video generation: grok-imagine-video-1.5 $0.08 per second at 480p, $0.14 at 720p, $0.25 at 1080p. grok-imagine-video-1.5-lite $0.02 per second at 480p, $0.03 at 720p, $0.14 at 1080p. grok-imagine-video $0.05 per second at 480p, $0.07 at 720p. Batch API discounts: 20% off input, cached input, output and reasoning tokens on grok-4.7, grok-4.6, grok-4.5, grok-4.3, grok-4.20-0309-reasoning, grok-4.20-0309-non-reasoning and grok-4.20-multi-agent-0309. grok-4.7 under 200k prompt tokens: $1.60 input, $0.40 cached input, $4.80 output per 1M tokens. grok-build-0.1 does not support Batch API. Image and video generation in Batch API are at standard rates. Server-side tools cost extra, per call, on top of tokens: web_search, code_execution and attachment_search $5 per 1,000 calls, collections_search $2.50 per 1,000, and x_search $5 per 1,000 posts and $10 per 1,000 profiles it returns. view_image, view_x_video and remote MCP tools are billed for their tokens only.
Claude API with usage-based pricing per million tokens (input/output). Claude Fable 5.2 $8/$40. Claude Fable 5.1 $10/$50. Claude Opus 5.5 $4/$20. Claude Sonnet 5.5 $2/$10. Claude Sonnet 5 $2/$10. Claude Haiku 5.5 $0.10/$0.50 (for prompts up to 100,000 tokens; longer prompts cost five times as much). Claude Haiku 4.5 $1/$5. Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 on November 9, 2026. Claude Mythos 5.2 has the same prices as Claude Fable 5.2 and is offered only to organizations verified through Anthropic's verification programs. The Batch API gives a 50% discount on input and output tokens. Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 fast mode cost $16 per million input tokens and $80 per million output tokens. Claude Opus 5.5 fast mode costs $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens. Fast mode is not available with the Batch API. Claude Fable 5.2, Claude Mythos 5.2 and Claude Opus 5.5 cache hits $0.20, Claude Sonnet 5.5 cache hits $0.10, Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 cache hits $0.25. Other models’ cache hits cost 0.1x the input price. Cache writes cost 1.25x the input price for 5-minute lifetime and 2x for 1-hour lifetime. Anthropic states "Claude Max, Ultra, and Team plans include monthly credits for the Claude API." Max gets $100 a month, Ultra gets $200, and Team gets $20 per Standard seat and $100 per Premium seat, pooled up to $500. Anthropic's pages state no free credit amount for new API users.
Platforms that host open-weight models (Llama, Mistral, Qwen, Gemma) on optimized hardware. Often the most generous free tiers — you get fast inference on powerful models without paying or sharing data for training.
ML model hub. Since 2026-10-07, free accounts get no included Inference Providers credits: free users buy credits or upgrade to PRO to call Inference Providers, which serves 200+ models. PRO ($9/month) gets $2.00 a month. Free accounts get 100GB of private storage and best-effort public storage; substantial storage needs PRO, Team or Enterprise.
Fast LLM inference on Groq's LPU hardware. Free plan: gpt-oss-20b, gpt-oss-120b and Qwen3.8 27B, each at 30 requests a minute, 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day, plus Whisper speech-to-text at 2,000 requests a day. Each of the three free models is also limited to 8,000 tokens a minute, and Groq applies whichever limit is reached first. Whisper is also limited to 20 requests a minute, 7,200 audio seconds an hour and 28,800 audio seconds (8 hours of audio) a day. On the free plan, gpt-oss-safeguard-20b is limited to 3 requests a minute, 1,000 requests a day, 2,000 tokens a minute and 200,000 tokens a day. Qwen3.8 27B, gpt-oss-safeguard-20b, Orpheus Arabic Saudi and Orpheus V1 English are Preview models. Groq says Preview models "are intended for evaluation purposes only and should not be used in production environments as they may be discontinued at short notice". Llama 3.3 70B and Llama 3.1 8B left the free and developer plans on 2026-08-16 and are Enterprise-only. Orpheus text-to-speech (English and Saudi Arabic) is also on the free plan, at 10 requests a minute, 100 requests and 3,600 tokens a day. Developer plan prices per 1M tokens: gpt-oss-120b $0.15/$0.60; gpt-oss-20b $0.075/$0.30; Qwen3.8 27B $0.80/$4.00. The Batch API costs 50% less and returns results within 24 hours to 7 days, without impacting standard rate limits. When requests to gpt-oss-20b, gpt-oss-120b or gpt-oss-safeguard-20b start with the same text as a recent request, Groq caches that part automatically and bills those input tokens 50% less. The batch discount does not stack with prompt caching discounts; all batch tokens are billed at the batch rate regardless of cache status. Orpheus text-to-speech costs $22 per 1M characters in English and $40 in Saudi Arabic. Groq's API is OpenAI-compatible at the base URL https://api.groq.com/openai/v1. The free models' API model IDs are openai/gpt-oss-120b, openai/gpt-oss-20b and qwen/qwen3.8-27b.
AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK. Free models are capped at 20 requests a minute; accounts that have bought at least $10 of credits get 1,000 free-model requests a day. OpenRouter's pricing page says "25+ free models" and "4 free providers"; its model list (openrouter.ai/api/v1/models) had 17 model IDs ending in ":free" on 2026-10-20, and that list changes from week to week. The Standard plan (pay-as-you-go) charges a 5.5% fee on credit purchases and includes BYOK up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month with no fees, 5% after. The Business plan charges an 8% fee on credit purchases. It adds EU and US in-region routing: requests sent to eu.openrouter.ai or us.openrouter.ai stay with providers in that region. Free and Standard do not include in-region routing. No contract or sales call is needed. On 2026-08-19 OpenRouter announced it is joining Stripe. OpenRouter says it will continue to operate as it is, with the same name, product and roadmap, and that existing integrations do not change.
Workers AI runs AI models on Cloudflare's global network. Every account gets 10,000 Neurons per day at no charge, reset daily at 00:00 UTC; on the Workers Free plan, requests beyond that fail until the reset. On the Workers Paid plan (from $5 per month), usage above 10,000 Neurons per day costs $0.011 per 1,000 Neurons. Eight models require the Workers Paid plan or prepaid AI Gateway credits: @cf/moonshotai/kimi-k2.6, @cf/moonshotai/kimi-k2.7-code, @cf/zai-org/glm-5.2, @cf/zai-org/glm-5.3, @cf/zai-org/glm-5.3-flash, @cf/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731, @cf/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017 and @cf/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-pro-0813. Cloudflare removes 24 models from Workers AI on 2026-11-20, including six of those eight (all but glm-5.3 and deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017); they can be called until then, and from 2026-11-20 requests to them fail with HTTP 410 Gone (error 5028). On 2026-05-30, Cloudflare deprecated 18 models and told users to remove references to them: @cf/meta/llama-3.1-8b-instruct, @cf/meta/llama-3.1-8b-instruct-awq, @cf/meta/llama-3.1-70b-instruct, @cf/meta/llama-3-8b-instruct, @cf/meta/llama-3-8b-instruct-awq, @hf/meta-llama/meta-llama-3-8b-instruct, @cf/meta/llama-2-7b-chat-int8, @cf/meta/llama-2-7b-chat-fp16, @cf/mistral/mistral-7b-instruct-v0.1, @hf/mistral/mistral-7b-instruct-v0.2, @hf/google/gemma-7b-it, @cf/google/gemma-3-12b-it, @hf/nousresearch/hermes-2-pro-mistral-7b, @cf/microsoft/phi-2, @cf/defog/sqlcoder-7b-2, @cf/unum/uform-gen2-qwen-500m, @cf/facebook/bart-large-cnn and @cf/moonshotai/kimi-k2.5. On 2026-10-15, Cloudflare's model catalog still listed @cf/meta/llama-3.1-8b-instruct-fp8, @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast and the -lora variants, but no longer listed @cf/meta/llama-3.1-8b-instruct-fast; llama-3.1-8b-instruct-fp8 and the -lora variants are among the 24 models removed on 2026-11-20. Cloudflare's suggested replacements were @cf/zai-org/glm-4.7-flash, @cf/google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it and @cf/moonshotai/kimi-k2.6, which is itself removed on 2026-11-20. Since 2026-05-30, requests to @cf/moonshotai/kimi-k2.5 go to @cf/moonshotai/kimi-k2.6, which costs more and requires the Workers Paid plan or prepaid AI Gateway credits; without them, requests get HTTP 403 (error 5035).
Ultra-fast LLM inference API — no permanent free tier. New accounts get $5 in free credits after adding a verified payment method, expiring 30 days after they are granted. Free Trial limits on gpt-oss-120b and qwen-3.8-27b: 5 requests/min and 1M tokens/day. Pay as you go after: GPT OSS 120B $0.35/$0.75 per M tokens, Qwen 3.8 27B $0.99/$1.49 per M tokens. Cerebras's public API now serves only gpt-oss-120b and qwen-3.8-27b, and a request to a model ID it has deprecated fails with 404 model not found. Model IDs Cerebras deprecated in 2026: zai-glm-4.6 on 2026-01-20; llama-3.3-70b on 2026-02-16, replaced by gpt-oss-120b; qwen-3-32b on 2026-02-16, replaced by gpt-oss-120b; llama3.1-8b on 2026-05-27, replaced by gpt-oss-120b; qwen-3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507 on 2026-05-27, replaced by gpt-oss-120b; zai-glm-4.7 on 2026-08-17, with no replacement named; gemma-4-31b on 2026-09-03, replaced by qwen-3.8-27b (Gemma 4 31B stays available on Dedicated Inference). Multi-thousand tokens/sec inference speed.
ML model hosting and inference. A new account can run the models in Replicate's Try for Free collection without buying credit, for a limited number of runs that Replicate does not state; after that you add billing and buy credit. Replicate says these models are not free forever. Most models bill by the second for the hardware they run on, such as $0.000025/sec on CPU Small and $0.001525/sec on one H100. Official models bill per output instead, such as FLUX 1.1 Pro at $0.04 per image; per million input/output tokens: DeepSeek-R1 $3.75/$10.
Free inference endpoints on build.nvidia.com: models marked Free Endpoint, including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 4 31B and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, can be called at no cost. Their model IDs are deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.1-flash, z-ai/glm-5.3-flash, openai/gpt-oss-20b, google/gemma-4-31b-it and nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b. Mistral Large 4 (mistralai/mistral-large-4-1t-a52b) is a Free Endpoint on build.nvidia.com as of 2026-10-29. NVIDIA's free embedding models are nvidia/nemotron-3-embed-1b, nvidia/nemotron-3.5-embed-1b and nvidia/nemotron-3.5-embed-8b. The free reranking model is nvidia/nemotron-3.5-rerank-8b. The 3.5 models handle text and document images and were added on 2026-10-20. Up to 40 requests per minute; limits may vary by model, and traffic from other users may cause throttling. NVIDIA's API Trial Terms allow free use for testing and evaluation only, not production. NVIDIA posts an end-of-life date on each hosted model's page on build.nvidia.com; after that date, requests for the model return HTTP 410 Gone. NVIDIA stopped supporting NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super (nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b) after 2026-10-19, and its catalogue no longer lists the model (checked 2026-10-21). Nemotron 3.5 Super VL (nvidia/nemotron-3.5-super-vl-120b-a12b), an early-access model, is a Free Endpoint. NVIDIA retired Kimi K3 (moonshotai/kimi-k3) on 2026-10-15. Other model IDs NVIDIA retired in 2026 include these. DeepSeek: deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash on 2026-08-07, deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-pro-0813 on 2026-09-14 and deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 on 2026-09-21. Kimi: moonshotai/kimi-k2-instruct and moonshotai/kimi-k2-thinking on 2026-05-12. GLM: z-ai/glm4.7 on 2026-05-14, z-ai/glm-5.1 on 2026-07-02, z-ai/glm-5.2 on 2026-08-21 and z-ai/glm-5.3 on 2026-10-27 (GLM 5.3 Flash, z-ai/glm-5.3-flash, is still a Free Endpoint). Qwen: qwen/qwen2.5-coder-32b-instruct on 2026-05-12, qwen/qwen3-next-80b-a3b-thinking on 2026-05-21, qwen/qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instruct on 2026-06-11, qwen/qwen3.5-122b-a10b on 2026-07-20, and qwen/qwen3.5-397b-a17b and qwen/qwen3-next-80b-a3b-instruct on 2026-07-27. MiniMax: minimaxai/minimax-m2.5 on 2026-05-12, minimaxai/minimax-m2.7 on 2026-07-27 and minimaxai/minimax-m3 on 2026-09-09. gpt-oss: openai/gpt-oss-120b on 2026-09-03. Llama: meta/llama-3.2-11b-vision-instruct on 2026-11-05, meta/llama-4-maverick-17b-128e-instruct on 2026-07-27, and meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct, meta/llama-3.1-8b-instruct, meta/llama-3.1-70b-instruct, meta/llama-3.2-1b-instruct and meta/llama-3.2-3b-instruct on 2026-08-26. Nemotron: nvidia/llama-3.3-nemotron-super-49b-v1, nvidia/llama-3.3-nemotron-super-49b-v1.5, nvidia/llama-3.1-nemotron-nano-8b-v1, nvidia/llama-3.1-nemotron-nano-vl-8b-v1, nvidia/nvidia-nemotron-nano-9b-v2, nvidia/nemotron-nano-12b-v2-vl and nvidia/nemotron-mini-4b-instruct on 2026-08-26, and nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b on 2026-09-01. Mistral: mistralai/mistral-large-3-675b-instruct-2512 on 2026-07-23, mistralai/mixtral-8x7b-instruct-v0.1 on 2026-07-27 and mistralai/mistral-nemotron on 2026-09-28. Gemma: google/diffusiongemma-26b-a4b-it on 2026-11-12, google/gemma-3-27b-it on 2026-05-12, and google/gemma-3n-e4b-it and google/gemma-3n-e2b-it on 2026-07-27. Phi: microsoft/phi-4-mini-instruct and microsoft/phi-4-multimodal-instruct on 2026-07-15. Others: stepfun-ai/step-3.5-flash, bytedance/seed-oss-36b-instruct, sarvamai/sarvam-m and abacusai/dracarys-llama-3.1-70b-instruct on 2026-07-27. Embedding models: nvidia/llama-3.2-nv-embedqa-1b-v2 and nvidia/llama-3.2-nemoretriever-300m-embed-v1 on 2026-05-18, and nvidia/nv-embedqa-e5-v5, nvidia/nv-embed-v1, nvidia/llama-nemotron-embed-1b-v2 and baai/bge-m3 on 2026-08-25.
Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs. Between October 26 and 27, 2026, Ollama replaced its Free plan, which included starter usage credits, with a $0 Pay as you go plan. Pay as you go charges per token for every cloud model, has no subscription and 3 concurrent requests. Running models on your own hardware is free. Reflection's Beam (beam:cloud) was free on Ollama's cloud until November 9, 2026, 12:01 AM PST. Since then Ollama charges $0.125 per million input tokens, $0.015 per million cached input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens for it (ollama.com/library/beam, read November 9, 2026). Beam is an open-weight model with a 1M-token context window. Pro costs $20 a month with $60 of usage credits, Max $100 a month with $300. Team, in early access, costs $500 a month for unlimited users and includes $1,000 of usage credits a month, shared across the team. Per million input and output tokens, glm-5.3 costs $1.40 and $4.40 and deepseek-v4-pro $1.32 and $3.96. Ollama Cloud serves kimi-k2.6 at $0.95 input and $4.00 output per million tokens, kimi-k2.7-code at $0.95 and $4.00, kimi-k3.1-pro at $2.00 and $10.00, and kimi-k3 at $3.00 and $15.00. kimi-k2.6 and kimi-k2.7-code are the cheapest Kimi models, and kimi-k3 is the most expensive. Usage is billed per million tokens at each model's rate, for example gpt-oss:120b at $0.15 input and $0.60 output, and some models, such as deepseek-v4.1-flash, cost half off-peak (outside 12:00 to 18:00 UTC on weekdays, and all weekend). To use cloud models without installing Ollama, send requests to https://ollama.com/api/chat with an API key from ollama.com in an "Authorization: Bearer" header, using the same model names, such as gpt-oss:120b; OpenAI and Anthropic clients also work.
Hetzner's experimental Inference API: an OpenAI-compatible API for open-weight models, free while it stays experimental. Base URL: https://inference.hetzner.com/api/v1. Models listed on 2026-10-15, with the IDs Hetzner's docs give: Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8 and Qwen3.8-27B, each with a 262,144-token context and image input. Hetzner says the list will change while the API is experimental; GET /v1/models returns the current one. Limits per API key, per minute: 4M input tokens, 100k output tokens and 10 requests. Needs a Hetzner account; keys are created at experiments.hetzner.com. Hetzner says it does not store the content of requests or responses.The page we cite for Hetzner Inference API states in words that it is free, which confirms the price — the limits stated here come from our own record rather than from that page.
Model routers, observability gateways, and specialized inference platforms. These add routing, monitoring, or domain-specific capabilities on top of LLM APIs.
ML model deployment platform. New workspaces receive credits for testing and deployment; Baseten does not state the amount. Basic plan: $0 per month, pay as you go. Dedicated deployments bill per minute. Model APIs bill per 1M tokens: GLM-5.3 $1.40/$4.40. GLM-5.3-Flash $0.15/$0.50.When we read the page we cite for this offer on 2026-09-10, we found a change we could not reconcile with the terms we publish, and we have read it again since, on 2026-10-29, without confirming them, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Rebranded to Respan; keywordsai.co redirects to respan.ai. Free plan: full platform, 100k logs, 1k scores, 5 datasets, 2 evaluators, 5 prompts. No credit card required.We could not read the page we cite for this offer when we last looked, on 2026-10-31, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
AI media gateway: one OpenAI-compatible API to image and video generation models from several providers, billed at each provider's price with no markup, platform fee or subscription. One model, FLUX.1 [schnell] FP8, is listed free per image ("Free to try", served through Fireworks AI). New accounts also get a $1 credit with no card required; Lumenfall's terms say promotional credits typically expire after 90 days. After that you top up prepaid credits. Under Lumenfall's terms (2026-03-05), content sent through free features, including free API usage, may be used to train AI models.
Social media scheduling, publishing and analytics. Free plan at $0/month. The pricing page states no per-plan entitlements: the feature list shown is identical for all four plans.
Keyless Classic API: one image model and GPT-OSS 20B text, free, no sign-up, rate-limited per IP. Every other model needs an API key and Pollen, and free Pollen comes only from quests. No credit card is required. On 2026-10-11, the nine setup quests paid 3 Pollen in total, worth about $3 because 1 Pollen is worth about $1. The documented API for text, image, audio and video requires a GitHub sign-in and an API key. On the keyed API, free use draws from Quest Pollen, with no promise of future grants. Paid-only models, such as Claude models, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Gemini 4 Argon, need purchased Pollen. Gemini 3.8 Flash (google/gemini-3.8-flash) is paid-only on Pollinations, so Quest Pollen cannot pay for it. Kimi K3 (moonshotai/kimi-k3) is not paid-only. Kimi K3.1 Pro (moonshotai/kimi-k3.1-pro) was paid-only until 2026-11-09, when Pollinations made it Quest-accessible; Quest Pollen can now pay for it. To run Claude Code on free Quest Pollen, run "polli harness claude-code on", start Claude Code with "claude --settings ~/.pollinations/claude-code.json", and use a model that is not paid-only. Quest Pollen pays for any model that Pollinations' live catalog (enter.pollinations.ai/models) does not mark paid-only. On 2026-10-18, more than 30 text models were not paid-only, among them GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4 Flash and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. The command "polli harness claude-code on" connects Claude Code to Pollinations and uses openai/gpt-6-sol unless you specify another model. Pollinations' harness documentation says the command writes "a Claude Code settings file" and: "Claude Code reads the file only when launched with --settings; plain claude keeps your native login and ~/.claude settings." (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/CODING_HARNESSES.md, read 2026-10-20.) GPT-6 Sol costs 1.5 Pollen per million input tokens and 7.5 Pollen per million output tokens. For requests over 272,000 prompt tokens, GPT-6 Sol costs 3 Pollen per million input tokens and 11.25 Pollen per million output tokens, and these rates apply to the whole request. GPT-5 Nano costs 0.0375 and 0.30. GPT-OSS 20B costs 0.05 and 0.18. NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning costs 0.045 and 0.165. Adding --model <id> to "polli harness claude-code on" picks another model. The documented API is OpenAI-compatible at the base URL https://gen.pollinations.ai/v1, with an API key from https://enter.pollinations.ai/keys. Pollinations' MCP documentation gives this Claude Code command: "claude mcp add --transport http pollinations https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations --header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY'". Its tools include generateImage, generateText, generateVideo, generateAudio, listModels and getBalance. "Calls use the same Pollen wallet as the Pollinations API." The "polli harness claude-code on" command runs Claude Code itself on a Pollinations model; the MCP server gives an agent Pollinations tools. Model IDs of some of the models Quest Pollen can pay for: openai/gpt-6-sol, openai/gpt-6.1-sol, openai/gpt-6-luna, z-ai/glm-5.3, moonshotai/kimi-k3, deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash, openai/gpt-5-nano, openai/gpt-oss-20b, nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning, moonshotai/kimi-k3.1-pro.
Control panel for Gen AI apps featuring an observability suite & an AI gateway. Send & log up to 10,000 requests for free every month.When we last read the page we cite for this offer, on 2026-10-24, we found a change we could not reconcile with the terms we publish, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
The data developers actually need — exact rate limits, token quotas, and model availability for every free LLM API tier.
| Provider | Type | Free Tier | Paid Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Groq | Inference | Fast LLM inference on Groq's LPU hardware. Free plan: gpt-oss-20b, gpt-oss-120b and Qwen3.8 27B, each at 30 requests a minute, 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day, plus Whisper speech-to-text at 2,000 requests a day. Full profile | gpt-oss-20b $0.075/$0.30, gpt-oss-120b $0.15/$0.60, Qwen3.8 27B $0.80/$4.00 per MTok |
| Cerebras | Inference | Ultra-fast LLM inference API — no permanent free tier. New accounts get $5 in free credits after adding a verified payment method, expiring 30 days after they are granted. Full profile | GPT OSS 120B $0.35/$0.75, Qwen 3.8 27B $0.99/$1.49 per MTok |
| Mistral AI | Provider | Since about 2026-11-05, Mistral's Free plan covers Vibe and Studio and does not include API access. Creating API keys and calling the API require billing activation and pay-as-you-go with prepaid credits. Full profile | Ministral 3 $0.1/$0.1 – Mistral Medium 3.5 $1.5/$7.5 per MTok |
| OpenRouter | Gateway | AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK. Free models are capped at 20 requests a minute; accounts that have bought at least $10 of credits get 1,000 free-model requests a day. Full profile | — vendor pricing |
| GitHub Models | Retired | GitHub retired GitHub Models on 2026-07-30, so there is no free tier. Full profile | — |
| Google Gemini API | Provider | Free tier: Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Gemini 3.8 Flash, 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemini 3 Flash Preview, Gemini Embedding 2 and Gemma 4 are free of charge. Full profile | Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite $0.25/$1.50 – Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview $2/$12 per MTok |
| NVIDIA NIM | Inference | Free inference endpoints on build.nvidia.com: models marked Free Endpoint, including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 4 31B and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, can be called at no cost. Full profile | — vendor pricing |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | Inference | Workers AI runs AI models on Cloudflare's global network. Every account gets 10,000 Neurons per day at no charge, reset daily at 00:00 UTC; on the Workers Free plan, requests beyond that fail until the reset. Full profile | — vendor pricing |
| OpenAI | Provider | AI API platform. One model is priced Free in OpenAI's own table: the moderation model omni-moderation-latest. No GPT model is priced free. Full profile | gpt-6-luna $0.10/$0.50 – gpt-6-astra $10.00/$50.00 per MTok |
| Anthropic API | Provider | Claude API with usage-based pricing per million tokens (input/output). Claude Fable 5.2 $8/$40. Claude Fable 5.1 $10/$50. Claude Opus 5.5 $4/$20. Claude Sonnet 5.5 $2/$10. Claude Sonnet 5 $2/$10. Full profile | Claude Haiku 5.5 $0.10/$0.50 – Claude Fable 5.1 $10/$50 per MTok |
| Hugging Face | Platform | ML model hub. Since 2026-10-07, free accounts get no included Inference Providers credits: free users buy credits or upgrade to PRO to call Inference Providers, which serves 200+ models. PRO ($9/month) gets $2.00 a month. Full profile | — vendor pricing |
| xAI | Provider | Grok API, pay as you go: sign up at console.x.ai, then load it with credits. grok-4.7 $2.00/$6.00 (per 1M tokens, under 200k prompt tokens). grok-4.3 $1.25/$2.50 (under 200k prompt tokens). Full profile | grok-build-0.1 $1.00/$2.00, grok-4.3 $1.25/$2.50, grok-4.7 $2.00/$6.00 per MTok |
Mistral: The Free plan has included no API access since about 2026-11-05. API keys and API calls require billing activation and pay-as-you-go with prepaid credits. OpenRouter gives one API key for 25+ free models. GitHub Models is recorded as Retired, so the widest free selection it carried is no longer one of the options here. Of the proprietary frontier APIs, xAI and Anthropic are pay-as-you-go (Anthropic's Claude Max, Ultra and Team plans include monthly credits for the Claude API), and OpenAI prices no GPT model free. Catalogue dates August to November 2026.
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